Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union

Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union is the name of an exhibition of Russian art the Saatchi Gallery.  Here were my favourite pieces from the exhibition:

 

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Prints by Sergei Vasiliev

Balance of Probabilities by Yelena Popova

Sex in the City by Gosha Ostretsov

 Entry No Entry by Erik Bulatov

Procession Series by Francisco Infante

 Criminal Government by Gosha Ostretsov

 For the Poor Janitor by Dimitri Prigov

 Museum of Contemporary Russian Art by Leonid Sokov

by Alexander Kosolapov

Superobject -  Supercomfort for Superpeople by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid

The Wurst Club

Another German sausage place as opened up near Bank.  It had not been open very long when I visited, which might explain why it took them so long to bring my currywurst and pommes over.  To be honest, it reminded me a bit of the episode of the Apprentice where the two teams had to run a fast food lunch place for a day.

Hopefully these were just teething problems due to having just opened, as the food was worth the wait.  There are no tables and chairs but you can stand at the counter by the window to eat.

 I didn't realise that my currywurst would come with a bread roll, so I was pretty full by the time I'd eaten all this!

The Wurst Club also sells a small range of German chocolates and sweets, as well as Club Mate to drink.

Arirang

Atlas Gallery had an intriguing photographic exhibition recently of  North Korea's Grand Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance Arirang.

The exhibition has now ended but there are plenty of clips on YouTube that are well worth checking out.  The show really is an incredible sight - tens of thousands of performers take part in it each year.

This photo shows the 'backdrop' - thousands of teenagers with a large number of coloured cards. They hold their piece of card in the air to spell out words or show scenes as a background for the performers below.  They are so synchronised that it's hard to believe that the result is not done by computer.

Happy Waitangi Day at the Bison and Bird

Ok, so Waitangi Day was actually on 6th February and I just didn't get round to blogging about it. TNT Magazine were offering everyone who downloaded a voucher a free drink to celebrate Waitangi Day the Bison and Bird in Clapham.

You can see from the size of the glass that it was not a small free drink. It was a Feijoa based cocktail and I'll be honest, it tasted a bit odd. But you never know until you try these things.

I liked the bar itself, especially this strange antler chandelier. There was also some live music, not sure if the singers were from New Zealand or not though.

Melodifestivalen 2013

Edgware Road is mainly known for its Arabic shops, cafes and restaurants that are open late into the night.  But the area also contains a cluster of Swedish locations.

I've been to the Swedish Christmas market before at the Swedish church on Harcourt Street but I'd never noticed that the rather unprepossessing pub across the road is actually a Swedish hangout.

The pub serves Swedish food and drinks and shows Swedish sporting events.  Most exciting of all, for me at least, is that they also host live screenings of Melodifestivalen!

The Swedes take their Eurovision song selection very seriously, as well they should, since they not only managed to win last year's competition in Baku by a landslide, but then went on to dominate almost every chart in Europe with their winning song.

Both Mark and his friend Will who attended this event with me speak a little bit of Swedish but we didn't look up the rules of the competition in advance.  Which meant that the evening passed in a pleasant haze of glitter, cheesy key changes and general confusion as to what was happening on screen.  A bit like the Eurovision itself.  Is it too early to be excited?

The World's First Pidgin Musical!

The 2012 African Film Festival in Rich Mix had an area where you could watch films for free.  A film had already started when I arrived so I sat down with the others to watch it.  The film was about the day in the life of two guys from Ghana and the whole film was made as a musical.   

You can check out the whole film on YouTube.  Here is the trailer.

Mexican food and Breakfast tea

El Paso is a little Mexican restaurant that is located just up the road from Old Street tube station.  I went there for a catch up with my friend Jenny and had a tasty burrito and a pot of English breakfast tea.

The restaurant has a sort of English tea parlour feel to the décor.

Abracadabra

To say that Abracadabra restaurant in Piccadilly is ‘quirky’ would be a bit of an understatement.   They serve a mix of Russian and British food, they have three tropical birds in cage by the bar, the urinals in the men’s toilets are shaped like mouths, the owner has a photo of him and Cherie Blair by one of the tables and there’s a huge chandelier above the main table (which is a revolving table).  We were also the only people in the entire restaurant.

I had pickled vegetables as a starter and my friend Paul had borscht.  I had pelmeni for my main course - spiced pork and beef dumplings with sour cream which was delicious.  I tried out the Georgian wine with the meal.  We were both too full to manage any dessert.

 

Ghana Festival

The Ghana Festival led me to the very end of the Northern Line as it took place in a National Trust place in Morden.  It was an event that started in the afternoon and I think took place until last into the evening, but I had to leave fairly early.

A section of the park was cordoned off for the event and inside were a number of stall selling Ghanaian food and products, from Ultimalt to KLM flights to Accra.

One of the clothes stalls had their own sound system and the guys on the stall were competing with the main stage to see who could play the loudest music.   I would call it a noisy draw. A dance off sprung up next to the stall as guys egged each other on to bust some moves in front of the growing crowd.

It was a pity that I had to leave early, as things just seemed to be warming up for a big party....

Czech beer at Lounge Boheme

Lounge Boheme is a little bar tucked away on the corner of Great Eastern Street.  You have to book in advance to get a seat because it’s really a small place.

Once we’d made our way down the newspaper lined staircase, we were welcomed at the bar and shown to our booth.  The furniture has a very 1950s feel about it and the drinks menus are hidden away within the covers of books, written in a foreign language.  Given that Bohemia is now in the Czech Republic I would hazard a guess and say that the books are written in Czech, but given that I went with an Irish guy and an Italian guy, none of us could confirm this.

The bar does serve Czech beer though, along with a range of cocktails, including an Apple Pie Tini and a Porcini Tini.  My Italian friend told me that porcini means mushrooms in Italian, which should have tipped me off to the fact that the cocktail contained mushroom flavoured vodka.  But for some reason it didn’t click, which was why I ordered and ended up drinking something that tasted like chocolaty cold mushroom soup with a vodka after taste.